EVENTS

The “constant superstition” of William Lane Craig

Back at the Evangelical Realism blog, we’ve made it to Dr. Craig’s Intelligent Design arguments in Chapter 5 of his book On Guard. As you might imagine, I have a few points of disagreement with his logic, starting with his assumption that constants can have different values. Stop by if you’re interested and have some free time.

Comments

The link needs fixing. WLC is a tool. He sounds all philosophical and science-y, but all he’s really saying is: “Because we’re here, everything must have been put here just this way for us. Someone must have done that, therefore Goddidit.” It’s the argument of a three year old.

Ok, that’s pretty weird: it inserted the freethoughtblogs domain in front of the realevang.wordpress domain—even after I edited the link, deleted the extraneous info, and saved it. I had to switch to raw-HTML mode to fix it.

I will freely admit it: many-worlds does not explain why the constants of the universe are as they are. But that’s not even “science doesn’t even have all the answers.” That’s “why are you asking science stupid questions,” like when that Fox reporter asked Bill Nye if the moon disproved global warming.

Many-worlds is just a physical process, albeit an awesomely weird one. It can’t change physical constants. Not just “is not known to change physical constants” but actually logically can’t. “Many worlds” creates parallel universes by splitting one universe into two. Both worlds have an identical history up until the split happened, (because until then they were just the same universe,) and physical constants don’t change over time by definition, so if they were the same in the (shared, reflexively identical) past, they must be the same in both futures.

I’d say it’s a strawman argument, because no one who understood what many worlds meant would even hypothesize the argument he’s “debunking.” Except, I’m pretty sure Dr. Craig didn’t know how wrong he was, so he can’t have set up the strawman on purpose. Tilting at windmills would be a better metaphor.

Many-worlds is just a physical process, albeit an awesomely weird one. It can’t change physical constants. Not just “is not known to change physical constants” but actually logically can’t. “Many worlds” creates parallel universes by splitting one universe into two.

That sounds like the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. The multiverse hypothesis that is usually referenced regarding the “fine-tuning” argument is something quite different, in which different universes arise independently (e.g., from quantum vacuum fluctuations or colliding branes in a higher dimensional space), and may indeed have different values for the fundamental “constants”. In which case, it doesn’t in itself provide an explanation for why the “constants” of our universe have the specific values they do, but it is nevertheless of explanatory value, since it makes the existence of a universe with those values less surprising and unlikely.